About 80% of job hunting falls into the wild goose chase category. Yesterday I was lucky, finding two jobs I'd love and applying for them. One even came with a personal contact, the Holy Grail of job searching. So I was not surprised when today's search reverted to the norm.

It's all overhead honkers when the Monster Job Search Agent report shows up in my e-mail. Under the search category "editor-writer" come the following jobs, most of which seem to be in Florida and Texas:

• Janitorial Day Help
• Full Time Detailer/General Laborer
• RN
• GIS Coordinator
• TRAVEL THE USA
• Paralegal

 If you're a software engineer looking for a job, contact Monster, please. They need big-time help with their search engines.

At the couple-months-out stage, where I am, job seekers get discouraged. Many just stop looking. I can't. But my mind drifts toward things I love and for which I have no qualifications, only romantic job fantasies.

Like making cheese.

Visualize striding gracefully through green fields of goats (preferably tended by handsome young goatherds because goats are devilish critters and about as much fun to try to manage as teenagers), your white muslin overalls immaculate. Enter the humble cheesehouse lined with stainless steel tubs and sinks and shelves of artisanal cheese disks that elves or farmers working extra hours have put there earlier. Reverently lift one and carry it to a secret cave on the foggy banks of the Mississippi. Roll it in the ashes of hundred year oak felled by natural causes, wrap it in leaves and bark, tie it with twine made from goat sinews, and lay it down to rest and dream. In a few years, sell it to an obscenely rich person, of whom there will be more though others resort to Velveeta. Retire to write oddly compelling romantic novels in the old cheesemaker's cave. There may or may not be occasional visits from the goatherds. . .

A quick Google search sets me straight. Wisconsin is like the Vatican or Mecca of cheese. To even enter a master cheesemaker apprenticeship program here requires ten years of experience making cheese. Five of those years have to have been making the cheese for which you want certification. And then you spend three more years in the apprenticeship program. For each cheese you want to master. This is no work for the drifty and flippant.

Hard to wrap a 21st century mind around the notion that skill and experience lead to mastery. This world is more about the churn of random change, the squeaky curds of the latest software program.

I wonder how to package my own long-developed journeyman skills. Not in leaves and ashes, but with a sense that proper aging adds value.

About those leaves. . . I think I'd better go rake a bit. I'm getting dotty. . .

Now that my world has shrunk to walking the dog and looking for jobs, things look a little different.

For awhile there, I was even dreaming about dogs, which is pleasant enough. Lots of running around and joy in being a dog. But dogs, if you've noticed, don't look up to the sky much. Someone who has hunting dogs will rush to say it ain't so, but for the most part, dogs have their eyes on the present and on the ground. They look straight ahead, sometimes. Not up.

But today, like yesterday, seems different. The sky is blue and clean-looking, and if you look up, your heart will lift, too.

Walking off the usual trail, Idgy and I stopped so she could investigate some deep smell of deer in the flattened grass. While she was cataloging all the scent components, I looked up. A hawk, no prey in sight yet, was wheeling higher and higher, her steady circles growing wider.

It was one of those aha moments. Time for a change. Not just a change: a transformation.

Job hunting has been dead flat, news of financial markets frightening, the increasing misfocused anger of campaign crowds heart-wrenching. It's hard to keep your spirits up where they need to be if you are a hunter. You have to believe in your quarry and in your skills to find it. But watching the hawk I realized that I've been going about it wrong. Head down, doggish, focusing narrower and narrower, looking for the scent where I am and where there is no scent but my own.

Here's what I read in the hawk spirals:

Look up. The sky is not falling. Leaves and the market are, but not the sky.

Go higher to look wider and farther. Look to what's ahead as well as what's behind. The two are connected but they are in different places. Be calm and steady and alert. Open your eyes and your heart in a new way.

Keep the loyalty and joy of dog-nature. But don't stay at the graveside broken-hearted when the familiar is lost. Grow a cooler, clearer side. Nose, heart, wings, mind, eyes.

Look up.

Sometimes people ask why we write blogs. I do it to try to figure things out for myself. And I hope sometimes, someone else is working on the same things I am.

During our morning constitutional, Idgy and I meet and greet people who are strangers. Whether they want to be met and greeted or not. We have decided to consider people not yet known to us as potential allies--or at least interesting fodder--and not lurking dangers.

• The more spandex and high tech gear, the less likely a bike rider is to acknowledge your existence.
• Men are more likely than women to respond if you insist on greeting them when they are pretending not to see you.
• Dead body parts disappear faster in Wauwatosa than in the wilds of Brookfield, though you will encounter more critters murdered by humans in Tosa. This does not lend much support to my belief that people are good until proven bad, but life is still better if you think that way. Most of the time.
  

Today we were delighted to encounter some rarer sorts among the more domestic species. A woman, rather beautiful, was walking through the woods wearing leopard print satin pajamas; a white satin robe, loosely tied; major wrist and ankle weights; and a huge white Three Musketeers hat with mirabou feathers all around the droopy brim. Accompanying her was a tiny older man, neatly and conventionally dressed. I'm not sure who was walking whom, but they may have wondered the same about Idgy and me.

And why, I thought, not? Why not celebrate the day being a character you have imagined instead of the one you've checked out of the costumes-for-fading-into-crowds or the costumes-to-show-you-are-serious,-not-playing, boxes?

Today I'm going to create a job description for the job I want and then try to make it happen. I'm already cheered by the prospect.

Why not enjoy this day with less thought about coloring inside the lines? Nature doesn't, and it's brilliant.

Excuse me for being a little cranky.

The job hunt is not going well. Every day I pore through lists of jobs, most of which want impossibly little or impossibly much.  I won't open the mail telling me how much my painfully saved little retirement fund has lost: who needs to know that now? What would you do with the information? Sometimes ignorance postpones grief over things you can't do much about anyway.

It's lonely without kids in the house or coworkers to toss around ideas and the little events that make up a life.

And now I can't even listen to the radio for that illusion of being in community. The smart guys of the day on National Public Radio are discussing the moral failure of greedy human beings and the financial crisis it has wrought. Only the commentators aren't talking about the greed of those who made huge profits by lending money they didn't have to people who couldn't pay them back: they are blaming, ever so gently, the little guys. The ones who steep in the warm oil of our consumer society and then have the temerity to. . . want things. Houses and cars to park in front of them, like that. Jobs with benefits and pensions, if they still have those.

I don't know about you, but I'm not taking the blame for the financial crisis. Or listening to some smarmy professorial type talk about how good it might be for my soul to have less and, being jobless, plenty of time to reflect on that.

More futile job searching on the Internet and then I stumble on the blog 37 Days. One title smacks me between the eyes like things do when you don't know you are looking for them:

Why have we made a silent, unspoken agreement to not do significant work in the world?

Author Patti Digh was talking about the failure to root out discrimination. But you could apply the question to most of the mess we stay in until the status quo stops working for us. Then it's time to remind ourselves that the people who made the systems that don't work are unlikely to be the ones who can fix them. But maybe we can.

Maybe it's time to be more greedy about doing significant work, work that matters, work that makes a difference. Maybe that's our real moral failure: being too content to settle for things the way "They" tell us things should be. Maybe it's time, as Digh suggests, to be greedy about our own desires for the way things could or should be. And then to "fund our own revolutions." 

You have probably surmised that I am not talking about desires that have to do with increasing your own personal wealth above all other things.

If you had just 37 days to do something you love, make a change that needs to be made, fix the banking system or other government problems, or even to live, the premise of Digh's blog and book Life is a Verb, what would you do? What good thing would you be greedy enough to act on?

If you haven't looked for a job in a while, trust me when I tell you it's some of the hardest work you'll do. Even harder than looking for a mate: the consequences of that hunt are serious, too, but at least you might get some good meals and good stories to tell out of the quest.

But the upside is that on a day like today, you can do the most important thing there is to do: be in it.

In case you haven't noticed, the natural world is particularly splendid these days. Goldenrod and asters and tall grasses are glowing in the light, dancing with the breeze.

Judging by the five mile hike Idgy and I just took through some of Tosa's breathtaking places, you probably haven't noticed. Along the Oak Leaf Trail, then along Underwood Parkway and through the County gardens near Willoway, we were nearly alone. Three bike riders passed us. A handful of gardeners worked on viney crops. I introduced Idgy to a half dozen folks from Willoway who were excited to meet her and speculate about why dogs sometimes seem scared of men. Coming home, a dozen three-year olds with golden hair and red cheeks were listening to water sounds at the creek, their tenders close at hand making sure they didn't wander off to follow butterflies or sudden slithery things in the grass. A few men worked quietly, building retaining walls. A neighbor watched them.

Where were you? If you can get away from your desk for lunch or swap your hours around, do. I can search, fill out forms, rewrite resumes and letters after the sun has gone down. Maybe you can do what you do then, too. Though even late, the moon is full and the sky alive with insect sounds, so there's good cause to shut down the computer, the radio and television, the houselights, and just be still.

Life is short, regret long, work unending, and all the big problems need fresh air and fresh thinking.

And now, back to work. Can anyone tell me why a technical writer needs a Six Sigma blackbelt--or what that even is?

I have to admit to being envious of Sarah Palin about one thing: her success in the hunt.

I'm referring here to the job hunt. While I have nothing against hunting certain critters for food, I have no taste for it. Venison, yes. An occasional pheasant. But not the hunt. Once, my friend Lynda and I stole her bother's bows and arrows and were messing around with them, and I shot a Siberian crow. That was a shock, and more than enough of that kind of thrill for me.

Some of you know that the job I loved disappeared August 1, as the organization I worked for needed to pull back and regroup.  No matter what comforting generalizations you might be hearing, the economy's rough, and it's affecting businesses and people you know. Right now, there are so many unemployed people in Milwaukee that I lost at least a week's unemployment compensation: I couldn't get through to a resource person to resolve a small problem. As those of you who scorn the government know, the systems don't always have flexibility to correct mistakes. So you'd better not make any.

Enough about that. If you listen to all the discouraging words, you'd just crawl back in bed and pull the covers up over your head. This rainy morning, watching the edge of Hurricane Ike greening up the yard and hearing the comforting hum of the sump pump now and then, I'm engaging in a more pleasant fantasy.

Somewhere, in a dark room littered with last night's pizza cartons and dried crusts, a small group of the real deciders are exhausted with disagreement. They've gone through the short list again and again. The long list, too. One of them says, "This isn't working." The others respond, some using rude words, to this effect: "You got that right." One of them, inspired, says, "Hey. What about Christine? She's smart, creative, works hard."

"I dunno: she's kind of a bulldog, isn't she?"

"What's your point?"

"I see what you mean. We need someone who sticks with it until it's done. But does she have the experience?"

"Not exactly in this. But in other things that transfer to this, hell yes. Besides, she has maturity and judgment. And she's fun to work with. Isn't that what really matters?"

At the door, destiny knocks. Dum dum dum DUM. .. Idgy barks. I answer, still wearing my blue jammies with sock monkey designs but with fashionable purple eyeglasses.

"Can I help you?" 

"Not only us, but the rest of the country, and also the entire free world. The universe as we know it may be involved, too."

"Well, of course. I'm ready!"

I put on my green Crocs: there is no time for fashionable footgear. Besides, you can't run well in heels.